[mpen-dayton] FW: "Happy 4th of July" & "Paul Ryan" & "Tell Ohio" 's legislators to fix our aging water systems" & " The next 100 years" and more
FYI. Best, Munsup
P.S. Please reply back to me with 'unsubscribe' on the subject line if you no longer want to receive my e-Newsletters. The convenient link to unsubscribe is no longer available due to security reasons to protect my email servers.
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· FW: Happy 4th of July
· FW: Prevent Blindness needs your help this 4th of July to help protect your family & friends
· FW: What is patriotism?
· FW: Take it to your Congressperson!
· FW: They, too, were dancing
· FW: White nationalists plan to be 'protecting force' at GOP convention
· FW: 5,300 U.S. water systems are in violation of lead rules
· FW: Tell Ohio's legislators to fix our aging water systems
· FW: "W" is for "Why"
· FW: The next 100 years
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From: inder chandra
Subject: Happy 4th of July
Wish you all a very Happy Independence Day. God bless the United States of America. May there be Peace in the world.
Independence Day - 4th of JULY - Happy Birthday America
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From: Katie Neubert; Dayton Area Manager, Prevent Blindness I Dayton Area Office
Subject: Prevent Blindness needs your help this 4th of July to help protect your family & friends
Check out these Miami Valley 4th of July Celebrations & Professional Firework Displays happening this weekend!
Happy 4th to you and yours and as always thank you for all your help and support today and throughout the year.
From: Robert Reich via MoveOn.org Civic Action
Subject: VIDEO: What is patriotism?
People tend to talk a lot about patriotism around the Fourth of July. That's why, in a special Fourth of July video I created with MoveOn, I lay out five basic principles of patriotism, which are pretty darn important to heed always, but especially in this high-stakes election year.
Please watch this two-minute video now (big band music, fireworks, and all) and then share it with your family and friends. (And don't worry if you're not on Facebook. We've added a YouTube link below!)
True patriotism isn't about putting up walls around our nation's borders. And it's never fueled by hate-filled or divisive rhetoric.
Patriotism is about coming together for the common good. It's about investing in our nation and always celebrating the "We" in "We the people."
Thank you for watching and sharing this special Fourth of July message from me and MoveOn.
Have a happy and safe weekend.
P.S. If you're not on Facebook, click here to access the video on YouTube.
Want to support our work? MoveOn member contributions have powered our work together for more than 17 years. Hundreds of thousands of people chip in each year—which is why we're able to be fiercely independent, answering to no individual, corporation, politician, or political party. You can become a monthly donor by clicking here, or chip in a one-time gift here. Contributions to MoveOn.org Civic Action are not tax deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.
From: CODEPINK
Subject: Take it to your Congressperson!
Last week, Congressional Democrats made a splash in the media with a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives and a social media campaign called #NoBillNoBreak. We were thrilled by the action, even if we were skeptical of their demands – including their support for using the unconstitutional "terrorist watch list" that discriminates against Muslims – because it seemed that some members of Congress were finally getting serious about gun violence. Sadly, we were disappointed once again when the protesting members of Congress caved and went on break even though no bill was ever put up for a vote. Now members are back home in their districts and we have a real opportunity to press them – in person – to back the assault weapons ban, H.R. 4269.
Contact your member of Congress and demand REAL gun law reform: Tell them to co-sponsor H.R. 4269, a bill that would ban assault weapons!
Members of Congress are back in their home districts for the Independence Day break – which is a great opportunity for us to demand they back REAL gun law reform! The coalition we work with is organizing to meet with and push members of Congress to support the assault weapons ban bill, H.R. 4269, during the break – everything from in-district meetings to sit-ins! If you're interested in joining an action in your district, contact CODEPINK's Chelsea Byers for more info.
Even if you can't make a sit-in or other action in a district office, you can still make a difference while members are on break by calling your Representative and asking them to co-sponsor H.R. 4269, a bill that would ban assault weapons. Click on the link to find out how to get your Congressperson's local office number, a sample message and instructions on how to make a call. Then, after you call, let us know how it goes!
Call your Congressperson while they are home for the Independence Day break and let them know your community wants them to take REAL action to prevent gun violence!
Thank you for your commitment to a world free of gun violence.
Alice, Alli, Aniqa, Ariel, Chelsea, Janet, Jodie, Jules, Mariana, Marwa, Medea, Nancy, Rebecca, Sam and Tighe
P.S. Join us to bring our message of gun violence prevention and our entire Peace Positions platform to the conventions! Click here to find out how to join us in Cleveland and Philadelphia for the RNC and DNC!
From: Mike Honda
Subject: They, too, were dancing
On this day in 1969, police raided a bar in Greenwich Village. Raids at this bar were fairly common: police would round up the patrons, and sometimes charge some of them with infractions like loitering or not wearing "at least four pieces of gender-appropriate garb." The police would shame and mock the people they arrested.
The bar was called the Stonewall Inn. The patrons were LGBTQ. Stonewall was one of a few places where the LGBTQ community could gather to socialize, dance, and be together.
But on this day in 1969, the LGBTQ patrons fought back against the police who were harassing them. The riots continued for days, the size of the crowd doubling as trans, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people – led by trans women of color – demanded freedom from discrimination and oppression. On June 28th, 1969, the gay rights movement was born.
This week, 47 years later, this bar — The Stonewall Inn — became a national monument, as designated by President Barack Obama. But as with any movement of justice and equality, the journey for LGBTQ equality has been marked both by inspiring leaps of progress and tragic setbacks. A year ago this week, the White House was bathed in the rainbow flag as we celebrated a Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage the law of the land. Just one year later, we mourn the loss of 49 of our brothers, sisters, friends, and family, after a vicious attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando.
They, too, were dancing.
It is Pride month, and the LGBTQ community should be proud of the progress they've made. But until fundamental equality exists in our hearts, minds, and laws, we must persevere. We cannot overlook an unnecessary ban on blood donations from bisexual and gay men. We cannot overlook employment discrimination. We must accept that we are not there yet.
We've come far, but there is more work to do. Let's stand together in this fight for fundamental equality.
Paid For By Mike Honda for Congress |
From: Southern Poverty Law Center, FIGHTING HATE // TEACHING TOLERANCE // SEEKING JUSTICE
Subject: SPLC exclusive: White nationalists plan to be 'protecting force' at GOP convention
After violent confrontation in California, white
nationalists plan to attend GOP convention
Members of the Traditionalist Worker Party clashed with antifascist demonstrators in Sacramento on Sunday, leaving a number of people bloodied and hospitalized. In an exclusive interview, the white nationalist group's leader, Matthew Heimbach, tells the SPLC that his members are planning to "to spread our message to delegates" and serve as a "protecting force" at the Republican National Convention next month. READ MORE
SPLC president urges Congress to not ignore terrorism from radical right
Earlier today, SPLC President Richard Cohen testified during a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing called by Senator Ted Cruz to discuss the threat of terrorism associated with radical or perverse forms of Islam.
Richard told the senators that the government must not ignore the threat of violence posed by far-right extremists as it focuses on terror emanating from those who sympathize with groups like ISIS.
He noted in his testimony that after 9/11, a high-level task force on domestic terrorism – formed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing – was allowed to lapse as the government turned its attention to al Qaeda. The problem was, the task force didn't meet again for 13 years.
During that period, the number of domestic hate groups and radical antigovernment groups skyrocketed, and the level of violence from the radical right increased by a factor of four. We've seen numerous acts of terror by domestic extremists, including last year's massacre of nine churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston.
Please take a moment to read Richard's important testimony. And thank you for supporting this vital work.
From: Field Director, NAACP Midwest Region III
Subject: Fw: 5,300 U.S. water systems are in violation of lead rules
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/28/us/epa-lead-in-u-s-water-systems/index.html
5,300 U.S. water systems are in violation of lead rules
Updated 6:50 AM ET, Wed June 29, 2016
More than 5,000 water systems in violation of rules 03:27
Story highlights
· 18 million Americans could be affected
· The EPA took action in just 88 cases
· Many utilities "game the system" with their testing methods
(CNN)Eighteen million Americans live in communities where the water systems are in violation of the law. Moreover, the federal agency in charge of making sure those systems are safe not only knows the issues exist, but it's done very little to stop them, according to a new report and information provided to CNN by multiple sources and water experts.
"Imagine a cop sitting, watching people run stop signs, and speed at 90 miles per hour in small communities and still doing absolutely nothing about it -- knowing the people who are violating the law. And doing nothing. That's unfortunately what we have now," said Erik Olson, health program director at Natural Resources Defense Council, which analyzed the EPA's data for its report.
In this case, the "cop" is a combination of the states and the EPA. States are the first line of enforcement, but when they fail -- as they did recently in Flint, Michigan -- the EPA is supposed to step in. But in many cases, the agency hasn't.
Figure 1: 17.6 million people served by community water systems with reported violations of the lead and copper rule (2015)
More than 5,300 water systems in America are in violation of the EPA's lead and copper rule, a federal regulation in place to safeguard America's drinking water from its aging infrastructure.
Violations include failure to properly test water for lead, failure to report contamination to residents, and failure to treat water properly to avoid lead contamination. Yet, states took action in 817 cases; the EPA took action in just 88 cases, according to NRDC's report.
What's worse, the report reveals that the EPA is also aware that many utilities "game the system," using flawed or questionable testing methods in order to avoid detecting high levels of lead.
That means there could be many more communities violating the laws, exposing residents to dangerous levels of lead. And the public has no idea.
How to test for lead in your home water supply
Figure 2: populations served by community water systems with reported health-based violations of the lead and copper rule (2015)
Even Flint, a city with the most notorious case of lead in water discovered, is still not listed as having violated the EPA's lead and copper rule.
In response to the report, the EPA said it works closely with states "who are responsible for and do take the majority of the drinking water enforcement actions and are the first line of oversight of drinking water systems."
The agency added that, "it's important to note that many of the drinking water systems that NRDC cites in its analysis are already working to resolve past violations and return to compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act in consultation with state regulators or EPA."
Figure 3: community water systems with action level exceedances (ales)
Gaming the system for years
A Virginia Tech researcher credited with exposing two of the nation's largest lead-in-water crises -- in Washington D.C. in the early 2000s, and in Flint last year -- said he noticed several years ago that the EPA was turning a blind eye to the "cheating" by local water utilities.
"Cheating became something you didn't even hide," researcher Marc Edwards told CNN.
Among the bad practices adopted by water utilities: selectively testing homes that are unlikely to have high levels of lead, asking residents to "pre-flush" their taps, and taking water samples "slowly," which reduces lead levels.
He wrote a paper on this in 2009. Then in 2011, Edwards said he overheard a local water official openly brag about cheating on the lead and copper rule.
"Right in front of EPA," Edwards said. "And I went back after that conference and I wrote EPA and I said, "How can you allow this to occur? I mean, what are you going to do about this?" He later shared that letter in congressional testimony. It concludes with a line saying the EPA, "does not care whether children are lead poisoned from public drinking water."
Why lead is so dangerous for children
The EPA says it's working on strengthening the lead and copper rule, and "focusing on enhanced oversight of the states, including implementation of the existing rule."
But Alan Morrissey, former senior attorney in the EPA's office of water enforcement, told CNN that addressing the problem could create even more violations for the already-strapped EPA water department. Morrissey left the EPA in 2015, frustrated by a lack of emphasis on water.
"If you fix the problem of the game in the system, you now have hundreds -- and thousands perhaps -- of municipalities that have direct violation," he said.
What's happening in Philadelphia
Experts say Philadelphia is a perfect example of the EPA unwilling to act, and having too cozy a relationship with local regulators.
The city has come under scrutiny recently for only testing less than 40 of an estimated 50,000 homes with lead service lines. City officials say that's all they could find after putting out 8,000 requests to residents. Seven homes had high lead levels.
After the Flint water crisis, the EPA in February issued new guidance instructing water authorities to stop pre-flushing taps and other practices that were considered "cheating."
A class-action lawsuit alleged that Philadelphia "tests an inordinate amount of low risk homes, diluting its testing pool and skewing the results in such a way as to paint a woefully inaccurate picture of the City's overall lead contamination."
The director of Philadelphia's water system, Gary Burlingame, said the EPA's language is merely "guidance," so it didn't have to be followed. Burlingame has been required to work with consultants who the EPA has hired on four separate occasions since 2000.
The EPA should at least "issue immediate alert to the people in Philadelphia to let people know it is very possible that the results are not reliable and that people should protect themselves," said Yanna Lambrinidou, a Virginia Tech researcher who has been advocating for a change in the city's policy.
8 unexpected places you may find lead
The EPA says enforcement of Philadelphia was left to the state of Pennsylvania. The federal guidelines are only guidelines and can't be enforced. The Philadelphia Mayor's office says it will follow the EPA's new guidelines in the next round of testing -- that's in 2017.
"Meanwhile you have an entire city that hasn't been protected," Edwards said.
There are other cities like Philadelphia. Almost 97 percent of lead-related violations recorded by the EPA are for failing to properly monitor lead levels.
"I think that the basic problem is that the federal EPA and the water officials, and a lot of communities across the country are very tight. And the EPA has been very reluctant to take enforcement action against them in most cases. They're friends, they hang out with each other, they ask for each other's advice, and you get close after a while," Olson said.
What is lead poisoning?
No action
Flint illuminated an invisible infrastructure problem.
Under the ground, in front yards across the nation, the service lines that bring water to our homes are, in many cases, made of lead. Though toxic, lead used to be preferable for its durability.
But just as science eventually told us that lead paint and leaded gasoline were bad ideas, so too we gradually began to realize that lead pipes should not be used to carry our drinking water. Federal regulations now mandate that water systems have an anti-corrosion plan, typically consisting of treating the water with an orthophosphate agent that forms a film to protect water moving through lead pipes.
In Flint, the lead pipes began leaching toxins into the water after the state of Michigan decided to switch the financially ailing city's drinking water source, and failed to properly treat the water with orthophosphates. To make matters worse, officials who could see the lead water levels rising didn't say anything for months. Meanwhile, families continued drinking the water.
CDC report reveals magnitude of Flint water crisis
There is no safe level of lead, but the EPA set a threshold back in 1990 of 15 parts per billion (ppb) -- the level at which regulators are supposed to step in and force water utilities to correct a contamination problem.
While Flint's astronomically high lead levels -- some homes more than 10,000 ppb -- appear to be the worst case scenario, the city is not alone.
EPA data collected by the NRDC reveals that a Utah water system serving 1,675 people had test results at 6,000 ppb. There are eight water systems in seven different states and territories with lead levels above 1,000 ppb. And 25 water systems with lead levels above 200 ppb.
CNN's Linh Tran, Nelli Black and Louise Simpson contributed to this report.
From: Tim, along with Annie, Eddie, Emma, Ernesto, Kelsey, Laura, Lindsay, Moonyoung, and Scottie (the Courage team)
Subject: SIGN THE PETITION: Tell legislators to fix our aging water systems 
Join us to tell Congress: "Water is a human right. It's time to fix our crumbling water infrastructure."
Flint, Michigan was the WORST lead poisoning crisis in American history. It left thousands of people without clean water AND exposed them to dangerously high levels of LEAD.(1) But here's the scariest part: it is only a matter of time before the next Flint.
Right now our nation's water infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. For years, Congress has SLASHED funding and blocked attempts to FIX our broken water system.(2) If we don't take immediate action now, water contamination could become the biggest crisis facing our nation.
Luckily, there's a landmark bill in Congress RIGHT NOW that aims to prevent future crises like Flint, and protect our access to clean and safe drinking water.
SIGN THE PETITION to tell your representatives to support the WATER Act to fix our nation's crumbling water infrastructure!
We've improved our cars to be more fuel-efficient and eco-friendly. But as the Flint water crisis showed, we've done very little to advance our aging water systems. Water pipes in some major U.S. cities are as old as Ford's first Model T car -- yes, that's a hundred and eight years old!(3) Even scarier, these pipes are predominantly made of LEAD (not what you want your water to flow through).
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that it needs $697 BILLION to update our country's broken water system.(4) And we must do everything in our power to make sure they have the resources they need to get the job done as soon as possible!
That's why Courage Campaign and 16 other organizations are supporting the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability Act (WATER Act, H.R. 5313). The WATER ACT is an urgent bill that would dedicate much-needed funding to keep our water and sewer systems up-to-date.(5) The best part is, it won't cost taxpayers a dime! It'll be funded by closing corporate tax loopholes.
Join Courage Campaign and our partners to tell your legislators to avoid another crisis like Flint by supporting the WATER Act!
The WATER Act is our ticket to finally give our water infrastructure a facelift. AND it helps keep our water public and accessible to EVERYONE. It'll even create up to 945,000 jobs!(6) But to win this fight, we need millions of Americans like you behind us, Munsup.
Private water corporations are using the Flint crisis to push for the privatization of water systems across the United States.(7) If they get it their way, we'll be left with higher water bills and poorer water quality.(8) All in exchange for a fat profit for the corporate water industry.
When news of the Flint water crisis broke, members of Congress stormed Facebook and Twitter, sharing their support for Flint and their commitment to fixing our aging water systems. They got their airtime. And now it's time that they live up to their words and stand up to private water companies (with a little nudge from you) by supporting the WATER Act.
JOIN US to tell your representatives in Congress: "I support the WATER Act because I believe that public access to clean and affordable drinking water is a human right."
1.http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3557?t=6&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy, http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3558?t=7&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy, and https://couragecampaign.actionkit.com/go/3559?t=9&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
2.http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3560?t=11&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy and http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3561?t=13&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
3.http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3562?t=15&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
4.http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3563?t=17&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
5.https://couragecampaign.actionkit.com/go/3564?t=19&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy and https://couragecampaign.actionkit.com/go/3565?t=21&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
6.http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3566?t=23&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy and https://couragecampaign.actionkit.com/go/3567?t=25&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
7.https://couragecampaign.actionkit.com/go/3568?t=26&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy, http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3569?t=27&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy, and http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3570?t=29&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
8.http://act.couragecampaign.org/go/3571?t=31&akid=2919.790590.0hL8iy
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From: Thomas Scott
Subject: "W" is for "Why"
How Bad Can a President Be?
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A new biography exposes the mysterious confidence behind George W. Bush's greatest failures. | |||||||
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HOW BAD CAN A PRESIDENT BE?
A new biography exposes the mysterious confidence behind George W. Bush's greatest failures.
By Thomas Mallon
Jean Edward Smith's biography presents a headstrong, doubt-free, and curiously opaque George W. Bush.
Jean Edward Smith's biography of George W. Bush goes on sale a day before the former President's seventieth birthday, and it's safe to say that no one will be bringing it as a present to the ranch outside Crawford. Smith, a well-regarded practitioner of military history and Presidential-life writing, comes straight to the point in the first sentence of his preface: "Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush." By the book's last sentence, Smith is predicting a long debate over whether Bush "was the worst president in American history," and while the biographer doesn't vote on the question himself, the unhappy shade of James Buchanan will feel strongly encouraged by his more than six hundred pages.
And yet, for all the overheated denunciations—a rhetorical comparison gets made between Bush and Hitler—"Bush" (Simon & Schuster) doesn't feel like a hatchet job. Like Bush himself, it is susceptible to sudden changes of heart and tone, and it never quite gets over a sense of loss for aspects of the pre-9/11 figure that Smith seems to enjoy imagining, however sketchily, in the book's early stages.
The writer certainly doesn't revile the compassionately conservative candidate of 2000. Bush may have permitted some brutal staff maneuvers against John McCain, but the campaign that Smith re-creates is mostly distinguished for eschewing "Nixon's classic formula of running to the right in the primaries and then moving back to the center for the general election." Making plans to govern "as the nation's C.E.O.," Bush disavowed nation-building abroad and put forward an agenda almost entirely focussed on what no one yet called the homeland. By Smith's reckoning, Bush ran a better campaign, and then a better recount, than his opponent. If the author favors the dissent in Bush v. Gore, he never questions Bush's legitimacy or lets up on the unappetizing aspects of his opponent, from Gore's inclination toward "résumé enhancement" to his pompous debating demeanor. (Four years later, in his first duel with John Kerry, a charmless, impatient Bush seemed almost fatefully infected with a variant of Gore's earlier boorishness.)
Smith points out that Bush attended no meetings of the National Security Council in the seven months prior to September 11, 2001. In her reports on these gatherings, Condoleezza Rice—Bush's national-security adviser, workout partner, and something of an alter ego—tended to synthesize disagreements among the participants, leaving Bush with a false feeling of consensus. The President's own focus was chiefly on matters like stem-cell-research regulation and the sort of educational reforms he had pushed through a Democratic legislature as governor of Texas. On the morning of 9/11, Laura Bush was in Ted Kennedy's Senate office, having come to testify for the No Child Left Behind Act; the White House she returned to later that day was a wholly different place, a domestic cruise ship that had become an aircraft carrier.
In Smith's view, the military and moral calamities began right then. If he is moderately critical of the President for being "asleep at the switch" in the period before the terrorist attacks—Bush felt no particular alarm when an August 6th C.I.A. briefing indicated that Osama bin Laden was up to at least something—the biographer is simply aghast once Bush seizes the controls. Within three days of September 11th, he says, the President had acquired a "boundless" confidence that put the country on a "permanent war footing" and the White House into a "hothouse climate of the President's certitude."
The war in Afghanistan, whose necessity Barack Obama insisted on in 2008 and beyond, is deemed by Smith to be scarcely more justifiable than the later one in Iraq: both are "disastrous wars of aggression." In an earlier book, Smith found the Gulf War fought under George H. W. Bush to be uncalled for as well, and here he seems comfortable making a distinction that holds the September 11th attacks to have been "tragic, but scarcely catastrophic." The younger Bush's with-us-or-against-us assertion in his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress ("Any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime") was in some respects only an amplification of what Bill Clinton had stated three years before ("Countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens"), but Smith reads it as "a serious overstatement." Maybe so, but his chapter "Toppling the Taliban" might have more revisionist force if it weren't deployed with so many overstatements of its own: "Within a month [of September 11th], the United States had lost world sympathy."
In another anti-superlative, Smith suspects that the invasion of Iraq will "likely go down in history as the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president." The thirteen-year legacy of "preëmption" makes this a hard prophecy to counter, and Smith's well-ordered scenes on the subject—Paul Wolfowitz pushing for war against Saddam on September 12th, just as he'd been pushing for it in April—do dismaying work. James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, the wise men of his father's Administration, tell Bush to go slowly or not at all, but George Tenet, the holdover C.I.A. director from the Clinton years, assures him that convincing the public of the need to invade Iraq over W.M.D.s will be a "slam dunk." As persuasively as anyone before him, Smith presents a strong story of how a successful military mission quickly unaccomplished itself; turned into quite something else ("the United States was going to bring democracy to the country"); and then festered into what Donald Rumsfeld himself, in his memoirs, judged to be "a long and heavy-handed occupation."
The dark thread of Smith's book is what he calls the "torture trail" of rendition and enhanced interrogation and prisoner abuse, a pathway perhaps made inevitable when Bush, after 9/11, "elevated the terrorists to the status of belligerents" but not combatants. Smith pays devastating attention to how the military figures around the President argued strenuously against behaviors that could be construed as violations of the Geneva Conventions. Generals Tommy Franks and Richard Myers, along with Secretary of State and retired General Colin Powell, insisted that, regardless of the casuistic memos coming out of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, any skirting of international law put American fighters at a retaliatory risk of the same treatment. In 2005, John McCain, who had been brutalized by his North Vietnamese captors four decades earlier, shepherded an "anti-torture amendment" through Congress over the Administration's energetic opposition; after an apparent reconciliation, Bush insulted McCain not with a veto but with a signing statement that made clear he would interpret the amendment however he liked. Military men—Grant, Eisenhower, General Lucius Clay—have often served as Smith's subjects, and his scorn for the modern-day civilian "chicken hawks" is so strong that he chooses this quotation from General H. Norman Schwarzkopf for a chapter epigraph: "After Vietnam we had a whole cottage industry develop, centered in Washington, D.C., that consisted of a bunch of military fairies that had never been shot at in anger."
It may have been Vice-President Dick Cheney who first advocated military commissions instead of civilian trials for captured terrorists, and it may have been the N.S.A. director Michael Hayden who urged going to "the edge," but each step through this dank basement resulted not from "decisions made by Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld, or the military. They were direct decisions of the president." Bush relished the speed with which he made them, and gave himself the title of the Decider. Smith's post-9/11 Bush is both doubt-free and indubitable, a man who effected the "personalization of the war on terror" and of Presidential power in general.
But where is the personality of this personalizer? How does a man whom Smith scarcely describes come to work such a mighty will over appointee after appointee and agency after agency? Where, in short, is the Bush in "Bush"?
Smith may have the Carlylean sense that history is shaped more by the decisions of individuals than by the large movements of social forces, but he is fundamentally more a historian than he is a biographer, and much more comfortable when his current subject is holding a meeting in the Roosevelt Room than when he is riding his off-road Trek bicycle. The author's disinclination toward the private and the psychological leaves a reader of "Bush" wondering exactly when and how an "unnerving level of certitude" took hold of the title figure. If no President "since Woodrow Wilson has . . . so firmly believed that he was the instrument of God's will," just how did the messianic annunciation take place? Smith says that, shortly after 9/11, James Merritt, once president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Bush, "God knew that you would be sitting in that chair before the world was ever created." But lots of pastors tell lots of Presidents lots of things, and most devout Christians believe what Merritt said about whatever chair they sit in.
After covering the failure to find W.M.D.s in Iraq, Smith compares the President to Captain Queeg for displaying "a willfulness that borders on psychosis." If Bush is going to earn the comparison, his biographer needs to do a better job of demonstrating how he travelled what would have been a long road from the mind-set of his days at Harvard Business School: there, Smith says, he was merely "energetic, but ill-informed, untutored, and unread." Both of these purported Bushes are observed by Smith from an abstract and considerable distance, the biographical equivalent of Bush's aerial assessment of Hurricane Katrina, and Smith approaches the earliest parts of the life with no more sustained attention than Bush himself approached Yale. The future President has reached the age of thirty-one—back in his childhood home of Midland, Texas, ready to make a losing run for Congress—by page 29.
Smith is not the first student of Bush to realize that he is more his mother's son than his father's, but readers of "Bush" don't get to see the forging of the bond. Robin Bush, George W.'s younger sister, who died of leukemia at the age of three, comes and goes in a phrase. One has to turn to something like Pamela Kilian's modest biography of Barbara Bush, from 1992, to learn that not long after her daughter's death Mrs. Bush "overheard George tell a friend, 'I can't play today because I have to be with my mother—she's so unhappy.' " He was learning to be not an overachiever but entertaining. There are still people around who can flesh out such events, but it seems that awfully few original interviews have gone into "Bush"; the book is widely but secondarily sourced, and in places could more rigorously attribute direct quotations. Bush himself did not sit down with the author.
At the bottom of Smith's pages, one finds a great many extended, conversational footnotes. Often they are historical asides, interesting if somewhat tangential, but so numerous as to form a kind of retreat, a typographical Camp David where author and reader keep avoiding the heart of the biographical matter. One is left wondering about so many things. What Bush gained by giving up drinking—a fast, if late, career start; the chance to be a more responsible husband and father—is indisputable; but did he lose anything? Some antic part of himself, the one that once cheered a grief-stricken mother? Most important, if Bush's faith gave him certainties that became overweening and dangerous during his Presidency, why did they not so manifest themselves while he was on the road to Damascus fifteen years earlier, or when he was inveighing against nation-building in 2000? Smith gives us a few interesting details about upstairs life in the White House during the weeks after 9/11 (the President and Laura Bush both began taking Cipro after the anthrax letters arrived at the Capitol), but it remains the work of another biography to show whatever inner transformation Smith believes occurred during that "tragic, but scarcely catastrophic" period.
Bush himself was a consumer of biography, from Marquis James's "The Raven," a study of the redeemed alcoholic Sam Houston, to the fourteen lives of Lincoln that he read during his eight years in the White House. Smith is aware of all this, but seems not to believe that point of view belongs to biography and not just the novel. In episode after episode of this volume, one wishes for a sustained attempt—however qualified and speculative—to imagine what Bush himself might really have been thinking, beyond the face-value quotations from his own and others' memoirs. During the recount, was his sense of mental well-being intact or hanging like a chad? What about that walloping facial boil he developed? It was an eruption famous enough to inspire an episode of "Veep," but it goes unmentioned in "Bush." Smith's book ultimately has less intimacy than such as-it-happened histories of the Administration as Peter Baker's "Days of Fire."
Smith's prior works, to which he frequently refers, supply odd, handy moments of precedent and perspective. When we hear Bush arguing that John Roberts's sunny, consensus-building temperament is an important qualification for a Chief Justice, Smith, the author of "John Marshall: Definer of a Nation," reminds the reader that the "charm and easy manner" of Roberts's distant predecessor may have been even more important than his intellect. In pointing out that Bush served as head cheerleader at his prep school, he notes that this "was something of a leadership position at Andover"—phrasing that the reader takes for sarcasm until Smith goes on to explain, in earnest, that Eisenhower and Reagan held the same post at West Point and Eureka College, respectively.
But history doesn't supply psychology, and perspective is not the same as perspicacity. Smith quotes, without disagreement, Barack Obama's courteous but manifestly untrue remark that Bush is "comfortable in his own skin." Those who observed the President's sudden shifts from the guy "you wanted to have a beer with" to stinging scold have realized that they were experiencing not so much changes in mood as moment-by-moment veerings between different selves, each authentic but neither integrated to any normal extent with the other. Bush's fanatical insistence on punctuality and his ever more exacting physical-fitness routines seem less a matter of self-discipline than of self-control, which is something different and more desperate. His habitually early bedtime may have derived from how exhausting he found it to be himself.
The years 2005 and 2006 were Bush's anni horribiles, the period that included the worst of the insurgency in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and an off-year electoral "thumping"—Bush's word—that turned both houses of Congress over to the Democrats. (Full, defensive disclosure: I served during some of this period as deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where, "Brownie" aside, we did a heckuva job getting small emergency grants to cultural institutions on the Gulf Coast.) But the second term began with Bush playing offense on all fronts: his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, proclaimed it to be "the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Two weeks later, he gave a State of the Union address that returned the emphasis to domestic initiatives that he had had to defer since September, 2001: he intended to transform Social Security through private retirement accounts, and he would liberalize immigration policy. "Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande," he had liked saying in 2000, the sentiment an oratorical forerunner to his brother Jeb's characterization of the "act of love" that motivates people to cross the border.
"Bush was reaching for the stars," Smith writes. "His foreign policy aim was to spread democracy throughout the world, his domestic goal was to enshrine individual choice. The common denominator was personal liberty." Having won the second term his father lost, he had the "vision thing" that his father didn't, and Smith is aware of it. The author could have made Bush's international aidsinitiative, which ultimately directed tens of billions of dollars abroad, into a grudging footnote, but he instead gives a full chapter to what he calls "an amazing achievement," perhaps the most lasting one of the Bush Presidency.
Immigration and Social Security, however, came to naught, in large measure because of Hurricane Katrina. "Politically, [Bush] could never recover" from his slowness off the mark, Smith says; his perceived indifference hurt him more in the second term than the perception of illegitimacy had hobbled him in the first. He could not have been unaware that his Presidency was floating away, and that Iraq appeared ready to end not in a muddle but in a rout. Smith quotes Karen Hughes, one of the "Iron Triangle" of aides Bush brought with him from Texas to the White House in 2001: "He felt really strongly that it was his sheer force of will that was holding the line between winning and losing the war. That everybody else was ready to abandon it." Bush had to persuade Rice, who had become the Secretary of State, to overcome her doubts about the five-brigade "surge" that eventually reversed the slide. In ordering the change, he told the skeptical Joint Chiefs of Staff, "I am the President"—a reminder that they had been out of the chain of command since 1986. The surge seems to be the only military decision by Bush that Smith half approves of, via a kind of mathematical paradox: "The fact that the surge was not solely responsible for the decline in violence in Iraq in no way diminishes its importance. By coinciding with the decline it provided Bush with a rationale for beginning the drawdown of American forces."
Iraq's greater stability probably allowed Bush to get through the 2008 financial crisis as well as he did. Smith faults him for a slow, Katrina-style response to the subprime-mortgage collapse, but sees him taking command in time to push thetarp bill through Congress on its second try: "If we're really looking at another Great Depression," he said, "you can be damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover." He was by now "very much alone" in a White House devoid of stalwarts and familiar faces; the relationship with Cheney, even before their falling out over the President's refusal to pardon I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby for his part in the Valerie Plame affair, wasn't what it used to be. Smith, offering a supreme irony, or maybe just a supreme concession, says that Bush, albeit ferociously unpopular, was at last, in 2008, "growing into the job."
George W. Bush was absent from the 2008 Republican Convention, to the pleasure of his would-be successor, John McCain, who experienced a moment of luck in the form of Gustav, another hurricane. The Republicans cancelled the Convention session for which Bush's and Cheney's in-person appearances were scheduled; the assemblage in St. Paul, Minnesota, was hardly threatened by the storm, but McCain took the opportunity to show the voters how quickly he could get down to the Gulf Coast.
Three weeks from now, Bush will once more be absent, as the Republicans convene in Cleveland to nominate the man who steamrolled the former President's "low-energy" brother. One strength of Smith's biography is the way it makes the reader continually consider whether the foreign overreachings of the forty-third President will prove more lastingly harmful to the country and to the world than the underreachings of the forty-fourth, but that is not a matter that will be on the Republicans' mind this July. They will be gathering for a political Jonestown, pledging to help elect as the next Commander-in-Chief a man who insists that a protester who rushed the platform from which he spoke last March had "ties to isis." (He knows because it was "on the Internet.") Bush will perhaps be at his Crawford ranch, maybe even painting one of his odd, Hockneyesque canvases. They glow not with faraway fires or any particular certitude, just a sort of opaque serenity, something that may at last have descended on a man no longer obligated to see past the fence.
Thomas Mallon, a novelist, an essayist, and a critic, is the author of, most recently, "Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years."
This article appears in other versions of the July 4, 2016, issue, with the headline "W Is for Why."
From: Shan Cretin; General Secretary, American Friends Service Committee
Subject: The next 100 years
Just a few days ago, the Supreme Court voted 4-4 in U.S. v. Texas. This deadlock leaves in place the injunction on President Obama's 2014 executive action on immigration that would have expanded eligibility for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as expanded eligibility to millions of parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, in what is referred to as the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program.
AFSC spoke out against the decision with disappointment, because the executive action could have benefited approximately five million immigrants living in the United States, giving them some measure of protection from deportation. We depend on the annual support of caring and compassionate people like you to ensure immigrant voices are heard. Make a gift today to support all of AFSC's work to promote lasting peace with justice.
This decision is a setback, but it's not the end of the road. With necessary funds in place, AFSC will continue to stand for a fair immigration policy. As AFSC approaches our centennial year, we will continue working with immigrants and non-immigrants in places like Colorado to ensure the fair treatment of all of the state's residents, or in New Jersey to provide legal services for people in challenging immigration cases, and in other cities and states across the country.
I ask that you deepen your commitment to the future of peace by making a special $100 gift by June 30 in recognition of 100 years of AFSC. Your gift today will increase the resources immediately available to our programs this year, and into our centennial year.
AFSC is building a future where more young people are peace and justice leaders, where immigrants are welcomed to contribute their unique gifts, where millions are no longer locked behind bars, where reconciliation repairs the rifts created by violence, and where government spending prioritizes education and community service programs over prisons, weapons systems, and preparations for war.
For the sake of a more just and peaceful world, I hope you will choose to honor the work of AFSC with a special gift of $100 today. Thank you for all that you do in the name of lasting peace and justice.
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